Surgery time!

Who would have thought, that after everything that has happened, I could feel relaxed in an Intensive Care Unit!  But that is just how I found myself on Friday night.

Bubble Boy had to go in for a routine inguinal hernia repair on Friday.  Simple enough – hernias are so common in boys and premature babies.  However.... as we know, Bubble Boy was determined to do this his way. 

We were relaxed and a little bored while we waited for him to go to surgery.  He was well behaved and didn’t put up too much of a fuss given he had been fasted for a few hours.  He was taken off his click machine and placed back on the hospitals monitoring systems.  No big deal.  He started to alarm.  Still no big deal - at least, not to us!

 

A new hospital and a whole new set of standards...  His alarm was set at 90 (remember now, Bubble Boy had a good day if he stayed in the 80s!).  PANIC STATIONS!!!  But not from us!  We sat and laughed as the nurses acted like meerkats, popping up from behind their desk every time he alarmed.  The nurses tried to reassure us that he was OK.  Meanwhile, we sat there wondering when he would be called to theatre so we could go to the toilet and have a coffee!

The procedure itself was fine – he needed a little bit of oxygen blow over, but handed it well.  He came out of recovery and had a great feed – albeit after giving us filthy looks for making him go back to hospital!

Due to his prematurity, we were transferred to the Children’s High Dependency Unit for overnight monitoring.  This is where the fun really began.

 

They kept his alarms set at 90.  He de-sated down to 50.  They panicked.  He had 4 or 5 nurses looking at him, stressing, running around, recalling information, calling out for doctors and placing oxygen over his face.  They said he turned blue and that he should not have been placed in the HDU.  They worried.  We didn’t.

‘We have seen this all before, even worse than this’ I told them.  ‘He is OK’ I reassured them!  But they didn’t listen.  They talked of CPAP and ICU and continued with their stressing.

They called doctor after doctor to come and review him.  They didn’t want him in their ward.  He was too much work.  They didn’t want to have to sit and silence his alarms.  The ICU doctors said no, he was fine and wouldn’t be transferred.  They weren’t happy.  The Emergency doctor said no, he was fine and didn’t need to be transferred.

After 8 hours of panic stations, 8 hours of repeating his story over and over and over again, 8 hours of being on edge because of the nurses, I’d had enough.  When the emergency doctor looked at me and said ‘you look tired’, I cracked.  Of course I was bloody tired!  My son has just had routine, yet major surgery for a baby – he has a history of not handling things too well – and most importantly the nurses are acting like idiots and stressing me out!

 

The lovely doctor returned a little later on and informed me, we would be transferring – but that Bubble Boy was fine – I knew he was fine and he knew that I knew that he was fine – he was being transferred not for his sake, but for the nurse’s sake – they just could not handle him!

I walked into the ICU and felt an instant wave of calm wash over me.  We were discharged the next day.

Bubble Boy has had a stern talking too – we are NOT to have anymore hospital visits!  And given his reaction that night of only falling asleep when we were near him or holding him, I don’t think he is too keen for a return visit anytime soon.

 

Other than that, Bubble Boy is coming along well – continuing to pile on the weight, continuing to poop, pee and vomit his way around the house and continuing to develop into the cheeky little boy he will no doubt become!